Study On The Relationship Between Employee’impression Management And Downward Trust-the Moderation Effect Of Political Skill

Along with the development of science and economy, the crisisof confidence and trust has been becoming a more and moreincreasingly concerned issue for the whole society. And the issueof interpersonal trust, especially subordinates’trust in leaderswithin enterprises has also become one of the most essentialfactors for the long term development of the involved companies.Only under the circumstance that a certain harmonious atmosphereof mutual trust among employees and subordinates’trust in leadershas been built, could there be an opportunity for the organization todecrease its management costs, strengthen its team cohesivenessand improve its competitive advantages. However, it has beendetected that with the crisis of confidence and trust, peoplebecome more difficult to trust one another anymore, especially forthe leaders’confidence in their subordinates. As the dominators ofall the organization resources, leaders hold the direct call for thepromotion of their subordinates, many of whom attempt to acquiremore resources of the organization by playing the perfect courtierin many ways to win leaders’confidence and trust. Among all the techniques and methods, impression management is the mostfrequently adopted one. Since China is a country with“facephilosophy”, people usually tend to judge one another based on theimpression they have made, thus a good impression sometimescould make you obtain more with less. Therefore, trying to leavetheir leaders a good impression is also become one of the mostpopular ways in acquiring trust from the leaders for lots ofsubordinates. The present study aims to identify whetheremployees’impression management will exert influence ondownward trust. And if it will, how the effect will be?On the basis of the observation and analysis of the formerrelevant research, it is found that in spite of the abundant studiesof impression management and interpersonal trust, there were stilla relatively small amount of studies that concern the relationshipbetween impression management and interpersonal trust,especially the studies with political skills being the moderatorvariable. In order to fill up the vacancy, this paper is devoted tosystematically inquire into the relationship between impressionmanagement and interpersonal trust, and through the confirmationof political skills, the present study is also focused on the influenceof impression management on the downward confidence and trust.In this way, this thesis is of great theoretical and practicalsignificance.In the present study, the three strategies of impression manage,namely ingratiation, self-promotion and lead by example, weretaken as independent variables, the downward trust (leaders’trustor confidence in their subordinates) as dependent variable so as to see their relationship. And employees’political skills were taken asmoderate variable to verify whether this factor has moderatingeffect on the relationship mentioned above. This study adopts theempirical methodology by collecting data in questionnaire survey.And through the correlation analysis and regression analysis byrunning the statistical software SPSS, the results of the presentstudy are listed as follows:(1)Employees’impression management strategies positively andsignificantly influence downward trust or confidence;(2)The impression management strategy ingratiation exerts apositive and significant influence on the downward trust;(3)Self-promotion positively and significantly impact on thedownward trust;(4)Lead by example impression management strategy exerts apositive and significant influence on downward trust;(5)Employees’political skills positively and significantlymodulate the relationship between impression management anddownward trust;(6)Employees’political skills positively and significantlymodulate the relationship between ingratiation strategy anddownward trust;(7)Employees’political skills positively and significantlymodulate the relationship between self-promotion strategy anddownward trust;(8)Employees’political skills positively and significantlymodulate the relationship between lead by example strategy anddownward trust.